President Joe Biden joined the leaders of Brazil and Colombia on Thursday in calling for new elections in Venezuela, following an election both the U.S. and others have said appeared to have been rigged in favor of the sitting president.
Asked by reporters if he agreed with calls from Latin American leaders for new elections in Venezuela, Biden said “I do.” U.S. officials have said previously that available data suggested opposition candidate Edmundo González had defeated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Thursday’s short statement sees Washington align closely with the presidents of Brazil and Colombia, regional interlocutors the administration has seen as critical in the effort to get Maduro to accept results that show he did not win the election. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Colombian President Gustavo Petro called on Caracas today to hold new elections that are fair and consistent with international standards.
The statements stop short of calls from other countries in the region, namely Argentina, that have González as Venezuela’s president-elect and called on Maduro to step aside and cede power to the opposition. The U.S. has not called González the outright winner nor referred to him as president-elect.
But the calls for new elections are the most dramatic show of regional force from the U.S. and partners in the region, as they seek to resolve a weeks-long stalemate in the South American country between the country’s socialist ruling party and an energized opposition movement.
The Venezuelan government proclaimed Maduro as the winner of the country’s July 28 elections the next day, publishing national-level results that claimed that Maduro eked out a narrow victory over González. But the Venezuelan opposition dismissed those results, arguing that precinct-level results, known as “actas,” that they collected from most of the country’s polling places showed that González had defeated Maduro by a two-to-one margin.
The opposition published their own version of the results online, which outlets including The Washington Post have verified are accurate.
The election has been widely condemned by international observers. The Carter Center said in a statement the election “did not meet international standards of electoral integrity at any of its stages and violated numerous provisions of its own national laws.” The United Nations issued a similar condemnation this week.
Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have worked the phones in recent weeks, an effort to coordinate their responses with other countries in the region, namely Panama, Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, so as to avoid past missteps in promoting democracy in Venezuela.
But the administration faced criticism from longtime Latin America hands and from Republicans for deferring to Brazil and Colombia. Earlier Thursday, 20 former U.S. officials wrote a letter to Blinken urging him to take a more forceful stance on the ongoing electoral standoff in Venezuela.
The former officials, among them four former U.S. ambassadors to Caracas, wrote in a letter posted to Xthat Maduro’s actions “strike at the heart of broader U.S. foreign policy interests in the region.” They added that “the diplomatic efforts of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico are notable, but there is no substitute for U.S. leadership.”
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